Abstrakt
This article presents some of the findings of my long-term field research in the city of San Cristóbal de Las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico. Massive rural-urban migration occurred in Chiapas in the last four decades, creating the infamous "poverty belts" at the suburbs of San Cristóbal.
The inhabitants of these suburban areas are mostly of indigenous (Tzotzil or Tzeltal) origin and they earn their living by selling craftwork to the tourists visiting the charming colonial city center. In the following text I focus on both collective and individual imageries evolving from these everyday interactions and develop the metaphor of "Imaginary West" (Yurchak, 1995) - unseen yet ever-present homeland of the tourists and, most importantly, a place where "better lives" happen.
The landscape of imaginary West creates a strong sense of belonging among those who long for mobility but have never left the their homeland city. An attempt is thus made throughout the text to look at mobility and global movement from the standpoint of those who never move and to conceptualize the relationship between mobility and social media as an imaginative process, where the social network communication serve as "technologies of imagination" ( Sneath, Holbraad & Pedersen, 2009).